


Of blanket forts and cuddly patients

by WhisperElmwood



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-30
Updated: 2011-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-26 17:12:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhisperElmwood/pseuds/WhisperElmwood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has a cold - he's not as intolerable as John thought he would be</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of blanket forts and cuddly patients

**Author's Note:**

> Just a very quick, unbeta'd short, written for a friend who'd had a rough day. Also my first ever foray into Sherlock fic. Might try again. Maybe.  
> (Also, this is the fluffiest fluff that I have ever fluffed...)

 

~~~

 

Sherlock’s terrible at colds, John can tell. He’s never seen his – flatmate? Friend? Partner? – ill before, outside of the scrapes and bruises and gravel rash incurred during a case, and that’s not really ill, anyway, it’s wounded. But the moment Sherlock catches cold, he knows with a doctor’s unerring ability to read a patient that Sherlock’s bad at them.

When it first hits – and he knows Sherlock knows, the man is far too intelligent, far too observant, to have missed it – he lets it lie, thinking his reserved friend prefers to handle it on his own, without coddling or interference.

How wrong he is.

John arrives home after a day at the Clinic to find Sherlock ensconced on the sofa, wrapped to the eyeballs in as many blankets as he could obviously find, surrounded by tissues (Sherlock’s not exactly what one would call _tidy_ at the best of times, but this? This is pure bedlam) and apparently on the verge of death, if his sniffling and whimpering is anything to go by.

“John!” Sherlock finally notices he’s there – and if that isn’t an indication of quite how pitiable his faculties currently are, nothing else will do it – and shifts within his blankets, turning a look of abject misery on him. “I’m dying,” he intones, voice breaking a little, “My head – fluff! All – not working. Cotton wool…”

John purses his lips in an attempt to keep the chuckle from bursting forth. He’s never seen Sherlock so put out. Thankfully, Sherlock doesn’t see the barely-hidden smile; he simply subsides back into his blankets, disappearing until all that can be seen is his mop of curls pocking out the top.

“I’ll put some tea on, Sherlock.” The throaty huff that emerges is all the answer he gets, so John hangs up his coat, picks his way around the drifts of tissues – and he is going to clean as soon as he can, because that is simply disgusting, as well as unhygienic – and finds the kitchen mercifully clear of experiments for once.

“Have you been like this all day?” he calls as he sets the tea brewing. There’s a muffled sort of moan in response, so he shrugs, smirks and _deduces_ Sherlock rolled out of bed, grabbed the blankets, plonked himself on the sofa and hasn’t moved since.

As he takes the two mugs back into the lounge, he briefly considers sending a quick photo to Mycroft – but he doesn’t, Mycroft has enough material on his brother already. He puts Sherlock’s mug within easy reach, sips at his own tea and begins tidying away the building piles of tissues.

“John – Jooohhnn…”

John waits until he’s got every last tissue cleaned away before he responds to Sherlock’s sniffly calls. He drops lightly onto the coffee table and with a disdain for his own health that he normally wouldn’t condone, lifts a bit of blanket away so he can actually see his friend. Sherlock winces at the light, “I’m dying, and I’ll never get any more work done, and nobody cares.”

“Sherlock, you’re not dying and I’m sure more people would care than you know, if you were.” John really can’t help it, he’s smiling. Sherlock’s just so completely awful at dealing with a simple cold. Considering his ease at dealing with, say, a madman with a gun, or someone twice his size trying to cave his skull in with a brick, this is bloody amusing.

Sherlock sniffs – and something about it just screams disdain, even through the cold – and one elegant, and rather limp at the moment, hand drops out from the twists of material wrapped around him, reaching for John’s hand.

Slightly bemused, John lets Sherlock tangle their fingers together, and even gets up when the man tugs at him. With a bit of shuffling, and some gentle nudging to get Sherlock to bloody move, John ends up sitting at one end of the sofa with Sherlock’s head in his lap. If it were any other day, he’d think something had gone wrong with his own faculties – but apparently Sherlock is a cuddly patient.

Sherlock wriggles until he's apparently comfortable and John smiles down at the top of his friends head. He pull's the blankets back around the man’s shoulders, “Better?”

Sherlock nods slightly, “Much.”

With a quiet chuckle, John flicks the TV on, turns the volume down low and settles back, his right hand gently petting Sherlock’s curls. He’d thought Sherlock would be intolerable during a cold, but he can deal with this. 


End file.
